Overclocked Radeon Card Breaks 1 GHz

dacaldar writes "According to Yahoo Finance, noted Finnish over-clockers Sampsa Kurri and Ville Suvanto have made world history by over-clocking a graphics processor to engine clock levels above 1 GHz. The record was set on the recently-announced Radeon® X1800 XT graphics processor from ATI Technologies Inc."

Comments

One wonders...

[kko]

why this announcement would come out on Yahoo! Finance

Re:GPU to excel CPU

[TEMM]

GPU's are great at working on linear algebra problems, which are basically what graphics are. For general purpose computing however, they would not be that much faster than a CPU

GPU vs. CPU Speed

[Anonymous Coward]

I've always wondered...Why have GPU speeds always been so much slower than CPU speeds?

Are they made on a different process? Are they made with different materials? Are there signifigantly more transistors on a GPU?

Why don't we have a 3Ghz GPU?

It was 2D mode only

[anttik]

Sampsa Kurri told in a Finnish forum that it was over 1 GHz only in 2D mode. They are trying to run it with same clocks later. ATI left some tiny details away from their press release... ;P

Re:It was 2D mode only

[slackmaster2000]

Are you sure? TFA does say "Noted Finnish over-clockers Sampsa Kurri and Ville Suvanto achieved graphics engine clocks of 1.003 GHz and a memory speed of 1.881 GHz (940.50 MHz DDR (dual data-rate) memory clocks) with maximum system stability and no visual artifacts."

The phrase "maximum system stability" though might be misleading. If you define it as just POSTing, then man I've done some awesome overclocking myself! :)

Interesting that these overclockers are "noted", and "Finnish." That does sort of give them a little mystique, no? Anytime I hear about a Noted [country name] [scientist|engineer] I always think of an older guy in a white lab coat in some top secret super science facility working on amazing advances in science, like overclocking consumer video cards.

Re:GPU to excel CPU

[steveo777]

I recall reading an article on /. a long time ago involving a group of coders from MIT or something like that who pitted a P4 CPU against an ATI or nVidia GPU that was running at about a third the clock speed with a tenth of the memory. They were, of course, running mostly linear equations and the CPU got it's pants kicked in by just under an order of magnitude IIRC.

What I've been waiting for is some sort of mathematics program (I used to use Mathematica in college) that could utilize this concentrated power, rather than hampering the CPU.

Does anyone know if any researchers have gone as far as to utilize a GPU for anything like this?